I'm running firefox 3.6.12 on mac os x 10.6.5. I started using HTTPS Everywhere and firefox became almost unusably slow. It started with some websites loading slowly, which I could imagine is a result of using https. But then even pages that were already loaded would be slow, firefox would hang when scrolling down the page, etc. I disabled HTTPS Everywhere and the problem went away. Is this just the plugin, or is it possible something else is going on?

1 Answer
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This plugin will run slow, as it has to run a whole lot of JavaScript at every request made to change the URL. Also, it changes all links to HTTPS, which is why it hangs while scrolling.

If you're interested in seeing what it runs, the .xpi file you downloaded (if you re-download it to a folder) to install it can be simply renamed to .zip and unzipped for you to look at the contents, using the default Mac archive utility, or if you use 7-zip, you can just right-click it and extract to a folder for viewing.

At that time, you'll notice not only that it has to run JavaScript, but it also has to run comparisons from that JavaScript to the folder with different known sites preferences and it has to cross-reference other JavaScript files. Therefore, that can further slow the browser down, as your CPU is now using its power to search the contents of a compressed folder, which is slower than searching an uncompressed folder. So there are 2 of the main reasons why this plugin is slow.